Little research has probed the social meanings of race under apartheid

Evidence

Yet, if race is everywhere in these literatures, there are also some lingering silences on the subject - as both the focus and the context of academic study. With some significant exceptions, there has been relatively little research into the social meanings of race under apartheid. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 548

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why exactly did white South African academia avoid theorizing race itself during apartheid? Worth investigating what institutional and ideological factors produced this gap.
• SEED: An article angle: ‘Why South Africa, the world’s most race-stratified society, produced so little theoretical work on race’ — a case study in how proximity to a system blinds its scholars to the system’s central concept.
• XREF: connects to: Class-centered apartheid scholarship treated race’s relative autonomy as conceded but never analyzed. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 571; Apartheid scholarship defined race negatively as whatever is not class, never positively. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 574; Race-focused research on apartheid is recent and still early-stage — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 595